Online Dating: The Spanx of the Romantic World.

If you’re not familiar with Spanx, they’re a kind of undergarments designed to support and flatter your figure. They tuck, tighten, eliminate panty lines, and make you look fabulous under your clothes. They are also expensive, pretty uncomfortable, and very unsexy. Still, you sometimes decide they’re worth it, cause, they offer the promise of good things, like fitting into your skinny jeans.

I think this is a good analogy for online dating.

There are some hard truths about being single as you approach 30. Most everyone meets their significant others in school or at work. If that story is not your story, it can kind of feel like you’ve missed your chances. I mean, if, say, you attend a woman’s college, an basically all-female grad program, and work at places like a school that has exactly one—ONE—male employee, and he’s a flamboyant Olivia Newton-John fan who talks all the time about his “friend” Jerry, you will quickly learn that you probably have missed some sort of Coupledom boat.

But, as everyone says, that does not have to be the case! You can meet people at any stage of your life, through any means!! (The more punctuation marks, the more sincere the self-help author!!) Single people meet other single people at communal places such as baseball games or bars, through social activities like kickball, and, as you may have inferred from the title, from online dating.

I have at least two friends who have met their significant others online, and they have great relationships. Clearly the process can work. To be honest, though, I hate it. HATE it. I’ve dabbled in the process off and on, and have yet to get over my hatred. For various reasons. I know you’re fascinated to hear why…here, let me explain.

For one thing, there’s the awkward factor. If someone sees your granny panties Spanx, it’s kind of awkward, right? Well, I once had a man wink at me on a site and I recognized him from work (clearly this wasn’t the job with Mr. Newton-John.) Since he just winked at me, and didn’t send a message, I had no idea if he recognized me—we’d never formally met, and while he was pretty distinctive looking, I am not always the most memorable—and I felt like it made a big difference if he knew who I was or not. If he did, why didn’t he just talk to me at work? And if he did, what if I didn’t respond and then we ran into each other in the halls and it was super awkward because I rejected a wink? And if he didn’t recognize me, then my feelings were hurt—memorable or not, c’mon!! (Yes, I am someone who fulfills the “wtf do women want?!?!?” stereotype). After a few hours of agonizing, I responded with a message…”Thanks for winking at me. Don’t I recognize you from work?” I figured that covered all the bases, giving him an opportunity to answer whichever way he wanted and try to avoid the awkwardness. And guess what. HE NEVER WROTE BACK!!!

Seriously. No contact. He never said anything to me, online or at work, ever again, and I spent the next few weeks literally ducking into rooms to hide from him until he was transferred. Pretty much the worst case scenario (other than something like the guy pulling a gun on you)—we didn’t even get to do the fun stuff that normally leads to the awkwardness! I would say that this sort of awkward encounter is not something you’d have to worry about in a big city, but in fact my friend in Boston is now scared to go to her church meetings because the guy she went on a terrible date with after meeting him online is now dating another parishioner. So it happens. And it’s got high potential for embarrassment.

Also, despite some incessant facebooking and blogging, I am always nervous about online interactions. To paraphrase a fantastic movie, I don’t even like to order my SHOES online, and they only go on my feet!! (Clueless reference, just fyi.) But seriously, I always get nervous about buying things on the net. There are some security issues, for one (I’ve had my credit car number compromised on the web), and for another, you really never quite know what you’re going to get. If you’re on a dating website, you have to sell yourself. You pick your most flattering pictures, you try to focus on the interesting parts of your story, and you work hard to hide the crazy. There’s nothing wrong with that, really; even animals do the flirt and attract thing. But just as Spanx can give a false impression of your figure, so can an online profile lead you to have false impressions. This bothers me a lot, I think because I’m a real believer in my perceptions. I can form a judgment about someone about ten seconds after I meet them in person—it’s a gift and a curse. (Sidenote: I often try to NOT judge, but everytime I do that, I meet someone who proves my judgment correct!! Clearly, if I’m not supposed to judge, I’d be proven wrong more often. Besides, I never treat someone differently or worse because of my judgments. So it just keeps happening.) But online it is much harder to do that, and not having my judgment to fall back on makes me super nervous.

This stuff has been on my mind because guess who finally went back online. I’ve been off for a while. There are some nice guys online in Charlottesville, but the majority of them have screen names like “BigHuckin’72” and write profiles that misspell words like “woman” and “business.” “I own my own bisness and just need a good womon for the weekends.” Scary stuff. Plus, I got emotionally invested in two guys who I knew in face-to-face life, one after the other, and was too wrapped up pining and all that rot to spare any more romantic energy. Well, big surprise, those situations didn’t work out, and with the move to a big city where I need to find the cool bars, it seemed like a good time to put on my grown-up Spanx panties and deal with it.

So far, nothing has happened to reverse my hatred. I did get asked out, but I have mixed feelings. First of all, I only responded in the first place cause I promised myself to be less picky (“You see how picky I am about my shoes”….sorry, Clueless relapse) since his whole profile was a quiz for potential girls to take to find out for themselves if they’re “worthy” of him. For the record, I did not keep track of my points, so I don’t even know if I am worthy. Second of all, after the whole message-back-and-forth-dance (be grateful if you are not familiar with this), he finally did the required ask-out. We’d been talking about how I haven’t explored the city so much, and he wrote:

“Well, I could probably be enticed to show you around Federal Hill (Bmore neighborhood) sometime this week since I’ll already be down there a lot running errands. Give me some days you’re around and I’ll see if they work for me.”

Does it make me a bitch that this made me really annoyed? Like, my first reaction was, “well, gee, don’t strain yourself.” Isn’t that a really half-hearted, full-of-himself way to ask someone out? But, here’s the thing. Maybe he’s just bad at emails and/or writing profiles and/or expressing himself through words. Maybe he’s just socially awkward instead of dickish. But I don’t know. I have no way of knowing until/if I actually meet him in person—something I am not so eager to do right this second. But remember missing the boat? Can you really afford to be so picky you don’t even give someone the chance of a first meeting (unless you’re convinced they’re a serial killer)?

So this is my dilemma. Any advice is welcome. I’ve come to learn that even bad first dates can be good in terms of stories (remind me to tell you about the time I was so tired of the date I couldn’t bear the idea of him accompanying me home and lied that I lived around the corner, walking out of sight and hiding until he left…good times) and since I’m trying to be less picky, it seems like I have to go. Still, makes me wish I had the kind of body that didn’t really need Spanx, and the kind of dating life that wouldn’t need online adventures. Maybe someday?

Hope your “bisnesses” are going well!! Much love.